“But Zoe is not.”
“No. To the best of our knowledge, Zoe is not.” “We have good telemetry up to the point at which she was attacked?”
“Yes.”
“Forwarded to Earth?”
“Forwarded to the IOS, at least. Degrandpre bottlenecks traffic to Earth.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that.”
Hayes blinked. “Believe me, that’s not what I’m worried about.”
“Have the satellites located her?”
“To within a meter of the digger colony, but the atmosphere’s too cloudy for any kind of visual confirmation.” “Not good enough,” Theophilus said.
They had come to the small shuttle-control chamber above the core. It was occupied only during launches—a good place for a private conversation. Hayes was in a hurry to get back to the remote-ops room; Zoe was alive, and he meant to bring her back to Yambuku. Right now Avrion Theophilus was only an obstacle, and the man’s peremptory manner made Hayes clench his fists.
He said, “Are you worried about Zoe or about her excursion technology?”
“The technology has already proven itself, don’t you think? The fact that she might yet be alive despite a wild-animal attack is evidence of that.”
“Because if it’s Zoe you’re worried about, it might be best if you let me get back to the business of bringing her home.”
“Not all the novel technology is in her excursion suit, Dr. Hayes.”
“Excuse me?”
“She’s a package. It isn’t just the interface. She’s augmented internally, do you understand? She has an entirely artificial immune system riding on top of her natural immunity. Microscopic nano-factories stapled to her abdominal aorta. If the suit is breached, we need to know that. There’s much more we can learn from her even if she dies in the field.”
“You’re saying she might survive even if the suit is breached?”
“For a time, at least. It might be difficult to retrieve her body, given the situation here. But if we can—”
“Fuck you,” Hayes said.
He didn’t want to retrieve Zoe’s body. He had a better plan.
Dieter Franklin came into the staging bay as Hayes was suiting up.
Hayes’ standard bioarmor was clumsy and immense compared to the gear Zoe had worn. A sterile core wrapped in steel and flexiglass and nanofilters. Hayes had just sealed the massive leggings when the inner door slid open.
“You can’t be serious,” Franklin said. “Lee Reisman said you were raving about an emergency excursion. I told her you were smarter than that. Tell me I wasn’t lying.”
“I’m bringing her back.”
“Slow down a fucking minute and think about this! You’re planning to cross the Copper River in a suit of armor that can sustain you for, what, two days maximum?—when it’s working properly. And at a time when every piece of machinery we’ve sent into the field is either dead or failing and we can’t even keep our own seals intact.”
“She’s alive, maybe injured.”
“If she’s alive, she needs a functioning ground station to come home to. You’re more useful to her here. Not out in the mud with a hot servomotor, or worse, dividing everybody’s attention and costing us resources we can’t afford.”
“I owe her—”
“Nothing you owe her is worth suicide. And that’s what this is, you know it. Odds are, you’ll end up as a few kilograms of compost inside a broken steel shell. And Zoe will end up right where she is.”
Hayes wound a layer of insulation around his waist, forcing himself to slow down, do it right. “She was a fucking test platform, Dieter. D-and-P doesn’t give a shit about the diggers. Zoe thought she was here to do social studies, but she was a test platform.”
Dieter Franklin nodded slowly. “For the excursion suit. Elam suspected as much.”
“Elam suspected. But I knew.”
Franklin said nothing. Hayes tried to focus his attention on his armor, working the procedures, sealing bands of pneumostatic plastic over his rib cage. He wished Elam were here to read him his checklist.
“You knew?”
“I saw all the D-and-P memos. Little communiques to the Yambuku manager. No details, but enough that I should have realized it was her gear that mattered. She was a nicking test platform, Dieter, and I let her walk out there in all her glorious ignorance.”
“You need to think about this. She has good gear, but it’s not breach-proof. “We can’t be sure she’s still alive.”
Next, the soft inner helmet. “She has more than the suit. She’s been internally modified. She has a heavily augmented immune system. Even if her suit’s damaged, she might survive long enough for us to get her back here. Maybe long enough to save her life.”
Dieter Franklin was silent for a time.
He said at last, “Even so, Tam. It’s a bad bet.”
“I know it’s a bad bet.”
“Because Yambuku won’t be here much longer. That’s the obvious conclusion no one wants to draw. Look at the Oceanic Station. Look at Marburg. It’s the bios, Tam, working out strategies, learning how to corrupt our seals and our locks. Synthesizing solvents and spreading the knowledge, sharing it somehow. Five years ago, that biohazard armor was good enough to protect you. Today … it’s the next best thing to fucking useless.”
Hayes toggled the atmosphere lock. Overhead, a series of fans began to create positive pressure. An alarm sounded. Dieter Franklin fled the room.
Hayes pulled on his helmet.
EIGHTEEN
Pain. Double vision. Zoe felt herself being dragged, the heels of her boots bumping against impediments. She was suffering from concussion, she thought vaguely, or worse, from some cranial injury from which she wouldn’t recover. She smelled impossible things: burning rubber, ammonia, rotting food; and when she closed her eyes she saw pinwheels and flares. I She was terribly nauseated but dared not vomit. The excursion suit would process the mess, but probably not before she choked to death.
She was awake, or perhaps not: consciousness ebbed; time J passed in gusts, like the wind.
She struggled—briefly—when she realized the diggers were dragging her into one of their mounds, away from starlight and firelight and into the rocky, claustrophobic dark. The mound entrance was narrow. The diggers spindled their sickeningly mobile bodies and entered one at a time; Zoe was dragged by her extended arms, helpless, over the rocky Hp and into a tunnel encrusted with digger excretions. The air was thick with an unfamiliar stench, spicy and foul at once, like cardamom and rotted food. She wondered if she would asphyxiate here. In the dark.
And for the first time in her life, Zoe felt panic.
She had not panicked even in the cold dormitories of the orphan crib; her thymostat had suppressed any violent emotion and left only a hollow, pervasive sadness, the aching knowledge of her captivity and abandonment. What she felt now was worse. There was no advantage to struggle but she felt she must struggle. The need to fight obliterated thought, became a madness rising out of the meat of her. She tried to suppress the scream that rose from her chest but the effort was futile; the scream erupted and continued without reason or volition. She kicked and pulled at the coral-sharp claws that held her wrists and ankles. But these animals were complacently strong. All light vanished. There was only darkness now, and compulsive motion, and the enclosing walls of the tunnel. And the sound of her sobbing.